A Moderate Voice On Israel and Palestinians

I follow many who are passionate on the issue of Israel and Palestine on twitter. I happened upon Ari Kohen, and found him interesting, not only because he is a professor on the issue, but also because he is a Jew that is often attacked as not being pro Israel enough. Given the chaos there now, I thought his “moderate” voice might be an interesting take. I asked him to guest post.

Over the past few weeks, extremism and violence once again escalated and finally exploded in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Space for a moderate position on the decades-old conflict shrinks at times like this, especially on the internet where partisans of each side can lash out at one another and at anyone else who doesn’t agree wholeheartedly with the purity of their side’s cause. As someone who teaches a course on Israeli politics and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I try to adopt what I consider a balanced position and, as a result, I tend to draw a fair amount of anger from everyone. In the past few days alone, I’ve been called a bigot and Nazi by extremist supporters of the Palestinians, and a self-hating Jew and Nazi by extremist supporters of the Israelis. I tend to view their ire as evidence that my position is a relatively balanced one.

I begin by asserting that Israel’s legitimacy as a sovereign is not up for debate, that its citizens should be able to democratically determine the character of the state, and that its citizens have the right to live their lives in safety, free from terror and violence. But I also maintain that the creation of the state in 1947-1948 was the occasion of a monumental tragedy for a great many of the Arabs living on the land that fell within Israel’s internationally recognized borders after War of Independence. I don’t have in mind here the Israeli Arabs, those who remained in Israel during the war and became citizens afterward (though their treatment could be a separate post in itself); instead, I am thinking of the massive refugee problem that remains unresolved to this day. Many Palestinian Arabs left the area willingly, prepared to return when the fledgling Israeli state was defeated. But many others fled as a result of the war while still others were actually removed — whole villages at a time — by advancing Israeli armed forces. Those who were refugees from war and those who were expelled have a clear right to return or to receive compensation. The refugee crisis was compounded in 1967 when Israel’s stunning six day military victory gave them military control of the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. To pretend that these refugees don’t exist or don’t have rights is to take a position every bit as extreme as the one taken by those who declare themselves enemies of Israel.

International law asserts the impressibility of a country adding territory through armed conquest and Israel would have done well to return these territories to their enemies in exchange for peace (as they later did with Sinai). This would have been far better for Israel than maintaining military control over the poverty-stricken and increasingly militant Palestinians encamped there. It’s pretty unlikely that these other countries would have worked to establish a Palestinian state. But, of course, Israel asserted that its security required a buffer zone from states that remained dedicated to Israel’s destruction. This isn’t an unreasonable position in the least, especially given the subsequent war waged against Israel in 1973, but it left Israel without a permanent solution to the problem these territories and their refugee population represented. In addition to security concerns, some Jews and some Christians in Israel and around the world saw the territories (the West Bank in particular) as rightfully belonging to the Jews (using the Hebrew Bible and the ancient kingdom of Israel to make their claim). And yet Israel didn’t want to annex the territory (apart from Jerusalem) in no small part because, as a democracy, it didn’t want to grant citizenship to Palestinian refugees who might quickly outnumber Jewish citizens and thereby negate the purpose of Israel’s creation, namely a permanent safe haven for Jews in a world that was radically unsafe for them. Instead, Israel began building settlements in earnest in the 1970s and continues to expand them to this day.

These settlements are clear violations of international law. But, more than that, they are a bad policy for Israel. As more and more Israelis come to live in the West Bank — the settlements in Gaza were dismantled when Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005 — it becomes more and more difficult for Israel to disengage itself. The settlers as a group have become increasingly extreme in their politics over the years, and increasingly violent. What’s more, the more land that Israel “settles” in the West Bank, the less there is for a future Palestinian state. And without a Palestinian state, or more specifically without one that Palestinian leaders could accept and convincingly sell to the people, it’s very unclear what Israelis think will happen to all the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Extremists, in Israel and elsewhere, are stuck in an untenable position: they don’t particularly want these Palestinians to become Israeli citizens and they don’t particularly want to give up any land Israel currently occupies in the West Bank to create a viable Palestinian state. I say these things not because I don’t support Israel but because I do. The creation of a viable Palestinian state is good for Israel; it would undercut the lion’s share of complaints against Israel from Palestinians and from the international community. And it would put the onus of governance and care of the Palestinian people on Palestinian leadership rather than on Israel.

Many of Israel’s most fervent supporters will argue that Israel wants to make peace but the Palestinians are committed to Israel’s destruction instead (in part because they wrongly view “the Palestinians” a unitary actor with one set of goals). Of course, they can and do point to Hamas as the best example and they have a good point. Hamas intransigence is well-known and no one can mistake the intent behind the merciless rocket attacks that Israel has faced for years; this is terrorism, pure and simple. What’s more, the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza are known to celebrate those who commit terrorism rather than to apprehend them as Israel does. But, prior to this latest aggression, Hamas was at its weakest in years in no small part because of its inability to make life any better for the Palestinian people. Its support had been eroded and its political leadership had just recently agreed to a unity government with Fatah that would have required Hamas to moderate its positions. But the Israeli government responded to the new unity government with saber-rattling rather than diplomacy, refusing to even try to work with some of the Hamas leaders who might, like the Fatah leadership, actually prefer the prestige of political legitimacy to being under constant threat of assassination.

This is the only reasonable way the Israeli government will really “take care of Hamas,” as Benjamin Netanyahu promised to do last week: by undermining its militants rather than strengthening them as the current campaign will do. Air strikes that kill and wound hundreds of civilians validate all the things that Hamas has always said are true about Israel: that Israel is the aggressor, that it is oppressive, that it violates international law, that it terrorizes civilians, that violence is the only way to respond to it.

Working to establish a viable state with Palestinian leaders who act in good faith has been, for decades now, Israel’s best bet for a long-term solution to the conflict. It’s also the only real option for the Palestinians; violence against Israeli civilians is both morally repugnant and very unlikely to result in anything but more poverty, destruction, and death for Palestinians. A peaceful solution won’t be easy to accomplish, in no small part because extremists always seek to violently disrupt the peace process whenever it seems poised to make any progress. That’s really the best recommendation of the peace process and the two state solution: it infuriates extremists on both sides, those who refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to determine its character democratically and those who refuse to recognize that the Palestinians have the same right to self-determination as Israelis.